Dreams of Jinni

By Nancy Willard

Published: November 9, 1997

So often what evokes our affection for a favorite fairy tale is neither the plot nor the characters but a single object -- a slipper, a spinning wheel, a lamp -- that the tale itself endows with the power to transform a pauper into a princess, straw into gold, poverty into plenitude. In a French fairy tale that lodged itself in my imagination when I was a child, the object was a magic book, which revealed to an unhappy prince his true identity and the task he must perform if he wanted to break the spell that imprisoned him. I assumed the magic book was a book of stories. And if I make one of those leaps in time that fairy-tale writers permit themselves, I can imagine no better book to put the prince in touch with magic than A. S. Byatt's latest collection, ''The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye.''

Of these five fairy tales, two will be familiar to readers of Byatt's novel ''Possession,'' which won the Booker Prize in l990. ''The Glass Coffin'' appears in Chapter 4 as the work of Christabel LaMotte, the reclusive poet and mythologist. (The chapter also includes the enticing beginnings of two other tales that I hope Byatt will publish someday in their entirety.) ''Gode's Story'' is found in Chapter 19 in the journal of Sabine de Kercoz, who tries to write the tale as she has heard the housekeeper tell it and discovers that this is not as easy as it sounds. ''I have missed out patterns of her voice,'' she laments, ''and have put in a note of my own, a literary note I was trying to avoid.'' Sabine's critique is not trustworthy. In Byatt's collection of tales, the oral and the written traditions could not have a more happy marriage.

When a story begins, ''Once upon a time, in a kingdom between the sea and the mountains,'' or ''There was once a little tailor, a good and unremarkable man, who happened to be journeying through a forest,'' we settle back and ready ourselves for a journey we have taken before. We know the patterns and motifs: the quest, the wise guide, the helpful animals, the triumph of the youngest princess, the anonymity of the middle sibling, the failure of the eldest.

Very soon, though, we discover that we are not in the world of the Brothers Grimm. These are true Wundermarchen, as the German Romantics used that term; they are unfettered tales of the marvelous. When Byatt superimposes the fairy-tale style on contemporary material, events in the stories do not hark back to an earlier time. Instead, the magic of the earlier time is brought into our own. Like the tellers of wonder tales before her, Byatt blurs the distinction between science and the miraculous. And in the title story, which takes up more than half of the book, she does this from the very first sentence:

''Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jeweled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.''

Byatt's stories have nothing in common with politically correct retellings or with the ''fractured'' fairy tales that make us laugh at the conventional formulas by turning them upside down. The fairy tale allows her to explore a concern central to much of her writing: the lives of characters imprisoned by the plot in which they find themselves. The heroine in ''The Story of the Eldest Princess'' is sent on a quest, but she has read enough fairy tales to know her prescribed fate. Breaking out of the pattern, she learns her true destiny from a character known simply as the Old Woman (a close relative of George

MacDonald's wise grandmothers and magic guardians):

''You are a born storyteller. You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one. . . . We have no story of our own here, we are free, as old women are free, who don't have to worry about princes or kingdoms, but dance alone and take an interest in the creatures.''

In the title story, Byatt offers us a wonder indeed: she dramatizes both the theoretical aspects of the fairy tale and the living truth of it in the story itself. Dr. Gillian Perholt is a scholar and a decoder of stories, a ''narratologist'' who has arrived in Turkey to deliver a paper at a conference on ''Stories of Women's Lives.'' The scholar, who sees herself as ''a creature of the mind, not the body,'' believes that characters in fairy tales ''are subject to Fate . . . which is perhaps simply the fact that they are mortal and return to dust.'' But when her aging body reminds her that their fate is also hers, she is overwhelmed by a sense of her own impending death.

Salvation comes in the person of a charming genie who gives her three wishes. After she has wished, first, for her body ''to be as it was when I last really liked it,'' and second, for the genie to love her, she finds that fate has shifted her to a more pleasing plot than the one she had imagined for herself. This discovery links her to the other characters in Byatt's fiction who want to escape their stories, and with it the roles by which they define themselves. The conversations between the genie and the scholar are beyond all praise, and the description of their lovemaking is a gem of exuberant metaphor and linguistic restraint.

In ''Possession,'' Christabel LaMotte provides a shrewd response to a fairy tale that has been sent to her for criticism. It could stand as a review of Byatt's accomplishments here: ''All old stories . . . will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which must be there. . . . And yet to add something . . . which makes all these things seem new and first seen, without having been appropriated for private or personal ends. This you have done.''

A. S. Byatt is a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights.